Rooney & Hassman's Tribune

Week of Oct 12-Oct 16

Rooney & Hassman's Tribune

Week of Oct 12-Oct 16

News, reminders, and more!

Vacation Approval Form

Students that will be missing school due to a family vacation or trip need to have an absence form filled out and returned to the school office (per policy no.5100.04 in the handbook). Forms can be picked up in the Horizon school office and need to be returned prior to the vacation dates.

Progress Reports

Please be sure to let us know if you have any questions or concerns with your student's progress report.

Grading For Learning: What do these numbers mean?

According to professionals Tammy Heflebower, Jan K. Hoegh, and Phil Warrick -- "Proficiency scales articulate learning progressions for each prioritized standard. Learning progressions describe how students' understanding of a topic develops over time....Score 3.0 (the target goal) is simply the prioritized standard, while 2.0 (the simpler goal) consists of simpler knowledge and skills that students will need to acquire before they can demonstrate proficiency for the target goal. ... Score 4.0 indicates that a student demonstrated learning, inferences, and in-depth understanding that go beyond the target goal; score 1.0 indicates that with help from the teacher, the student is able to demonstrate partial knowledge of the 2.0 and 3.0 content; and score 0 (we don't use 0 in K-8) indicates that even with help, a student is unable to demonstrate success with any of the content."

This newer way of representing student progress can be confusing at times. Often times we break it down for students into these terms:

3 --- meeting expectations; this is your goal. Work is done at grade level, independently and consistently.

2 --- close to meeting expectations; an area for goal setting. Work is being completed, but there is some teacher assistance needed and there may not be the consistency present for meeting expectations.

Parent-Teacher-Student Conferences

Conferences will be the week of November 16th. Families will sign up for a conference with their child's homeroom teacher through Skyward (sign-up will be available soon). If you need to talk to your child's other teacher(s), please contact that teacher directly. Encore teacher's information can be found on the Horizon contacts & staff profiles page.

One thing fourth graders have been focused on is advocating for themselves. Mrs. Hassman demonstrated her knowledge, or rather her lack of knowledge in football. After the students had a good laugh at how little she knows about the sport, she asked them why we feel comfortable sharing that we do not know a lot about something like a sport but do not feel comfortable enough sharing that we may be struggling on a math concept, or may even find a math concept too easy and need a challenge. We have assured them that this is a safe place and we need to rely on each other for help when we need it. Ultimately, we would love to get to the point where we can share this information openly with each other, but we know that is not always easy. After our conversations regarding this, we began getting many notes and having many student conversations asking for help, or even asking how they can challenge themselves!

Advocating for ourselves is not always easy. In fact, it is something we as adults try to work on everyday. We are so proud of our fourth graders for beginning to advocate for themselves and we look forward to seeing them grow throughout the year!

What's Going on in Fourth Grade?

Picture retake day will be on November 3rd.

Expert Listeners Program

Some of our fourth graders will have the opportunity to participate in our Expert Listeners program, developed by volunteer coordinator, Christine Baar. This program gives students the change to read 1-on-1 with a volunteer for a 15 minute block of time, as scheduled by their teacher. Students may work with volunteers several times throughout the week on their individual reading skills or reading goals.

We have found this time to be very beneficial for our readers. The volunteers give students feedback and coach them in many areas, including fluency and comprehension.

Math: We continued to work on developing our place value, addition, and subtraction skills while throwing word problems into the mix! Since we are now fourth graders, some word problems can be quite long, intimidating, and may even contain extra information! A strategy that we have found to be helpful is to underline the question being asked. This is the first step that allows us to evaluate what information we need in order to answer our question. We have crossed out extra information and used comparison bars to help us visualize. Sometimes, we even have to solve multi-step word problems! We will continue to work on this concept until our test on Tuesday, October 20th.

Do you need another copy of the study guide? Please click this link to get one!

Reading:

Our focus this week was on identifying story elements and zooming in on our characters. We worked on identifying character traits and inferencing. We went back to the text to find evidence to support our thoughts and ideas about the story and the characters.

Reading bookmarks -- it's really important that students are charting both pages read and number of minutes read. This week we talked about some "a-ha's" we might start to see. For example, students may be starting to notice that if they are reading nonfiction books they are reading fewer pages in a longer amount of time compared to reading a fiction book. Students may also begin to see patterns with reading levels of books -- more challenging texts may mean fewer pages read in a longer time frame; easier texts will allow more pages read in a shorter amount of time.

Writing:

This week we developed several characters that could be used in a realistic fiction story. We discussed how great writers know their characters inside and out. We also looked at several different problems, conflicts, or motivations characters could have that would drive the plot in our realistic fiction story. Official drafting of our stories are to begin next week. It will be exciting to watch as the students apply all they've learned at the start of this unit as they develop their first official story of fourth grade.

When students complete their published pieces, we will be inviting families in for our Writer's Celebration. It's an opportunity to read examples of stories the students have written. It's a gallery walk of writing! Dates for each class to be announced soon.

Language:

Grammar -- Our story, Mrs. Obnoxious, continues to provide students will opportunities to practice their proofreading and editing skills. Each sentence we add introduces students to new vocabulary words and highlights a specific skill, such as comma usage, spelling rules, using quotation marks in dialogue, etc. Students are also noticing different ways an author can introduce a character and use detailed, descriptive language to create powerful images in our minds.

Unit 2 Spelling work -- Word practice, sentences and illustration activities will be introduced this week.

Each week we are taking time in class to discuss the Greek / Latin roots that are a part of the challenge word list on the spelling study guide. One of our fourth grade standards this year is to work on Greek and Latin affixes and roots. Becoming more familiar with the roots, and understanding these roots, give us clues to the meaning of many new vocabulary words. This can assist us both in our writing as well as our reading work.

Fourth Grade Vocabulary Extravaganza!

This year the 4th graders do not have a Halloween party in their classroom; however, students will be participating in an alternative activity we've named our Vocabulary Extravaganza. On October 30, 2015 your child will be strongly encouraged to dress up as a new vocabulary word and teach the word to the class. Part of the day will be filled with vocabulary activities. Some families may choose for their child to wear their school appropriate Halloween costume and then think of word that aligns with it. Others may choose to think of a word, and then create an exciting costume to illustrate the meaning. For example, the teacher may come to school in her pajamas and have her sign say “insomniac.” Another student may choose to be Dorothy and come to school prepared to teach the students “absentminded.” Perhaps someone dressed in lime green colors could represent the word "chartreuse". Be creative and try to select a word that is not commonly known to fourth graders. It is meant to be a fun and educational experience. Please have your child fill the bottom of the sheet that is coming home and return it to his or her homeroom teacher by October 26th . We look forward to celebrating with your child the fun in learning new words!

Sincerely,

The 4th Grade Team

Music Program info from Mrs. Barootian

Ms. Barootian’s 4th grade general music music students (DeWitt, Hassert, Palkowski, Rooney) will be performing Composer Craze on Thursday, November 12th, at 2:30 PM (School Matinee), and 7:15 PM (Parent Performance) in the Pewaukee High School Auditorium.

The students will need to wear a black shirt (turtle neck, top, blouse, sweater, or button down tucked in) and a pair of black pants (slacks, black jeans, or leggings). A black skirt with black tights is also acceptable. This all black outfit is for our special finale. The students will need to wear this attire to school on Thursday, November 12th for both the school and evening performances. No high heals or light-up shoes please. A few students will be selected to act as famous composers. These students will wear additional costume pieces, wigs, and makeup. More information will come home for these specific students after selected.

That evening, students must report to the high school cafeteria at 7:00 PM sharp. Their classroom teacher will be there at that time, but no earlier. If you decide to come earlier, your child must be near you, under your supervision while waiting. Do not allow your child to walk or run around the high school cafeteria or halls unsupervised.

The auditorium doors will open at 7:00 PM for seating. 4th grade performers will not be allowed into the auditorium prior. Students should give their coats, hats, and gloves to their parents to hold onto during the performance. They will make their entrance through the aisles. Students will meet their parents in the high school cafeteria after the show.

Students are expected to attend the evening performance. Absences must be shared/communicated in advance with Ms. Barootian prior to the performance.

Your cooperation and support of our program is greatly appreciated! We hope you enjoy the show.

Music Program Information from Mr. Muehlbauer

The 4th grade classes of Ms. Torbenson, Mrs.. Swanson, Mrs. Edwards, and Mrs. Hassman are teaming up to present their concert “The Adventures of Lewis and Clark” on Thursday, November 12, 2015. at 6:00pm in the Pewaukee High School Auditorium. The students will also have a school matinee at 1:30pm. Ms. Barootian’s classes will be presenting their show directly after our performances at 2:15pm and 7:15pm respectively.

Concert Attire

The students will need to wear a whiteshirt (tucked in) or top and black pants (no white stripes please) or black skirt (black tights okay). The students will need to wear this attire to school on Thursday, November 12th for the matinee performance. and again for the evening performance.. We prefer black dress shoes over tennis shoes whenever possible and no high heels on the risers.

Call Time/Supervision

Students must report to the high school cafeteria at 5:45 pm sharp. Their classroom teacher will be there at that time, but no earlier. If you decide to come earlier, your child must remain with you, under your supervision while waiting. Do not allow your child to walk or run around the high school cafeteria or halls..

The auditorium doors will open 15 minutes prior to the show for audience seating. Frail elderly and wheelchair guests will be seated early. 4th grade performers will not be allowed into the auditorium prior. Students should give their coats, hats, and gloves to their parents to hold during the performance. They will make their entrance through the aisles. Students will meet their parents in the cafeteria after the show.

Students are expected to attend the evening performance. Absences must be shared/communicated in advance with your child’s music teacher (not the classroom teacher) prior to the performance.

Your cooperation and support of our program is greatly appreciated! We hope you enjoy the show.

Reading "home" notebooks

Expectation for these red, home, Reading notebooks/journals:

*2-3 entries per week

*2-3 sentences for each entry

*Entries can focus on our Reading strategies -- making predictions, identifying character traits, making connections (text-text, text-self), etc. Each student should have a set of questions they can also use if they get stuck trying to figure out what to write about.

Next "check up" dates (please be sure notebooks are returned to school on these dates).

Students should have a minimum of 10 journal entries by this next due date.